Ground Zero

In order to understand where I’m going with this, you should know where I have been. When I was 7 years old, my doctor decided that the 6 inch birthmark on the inside of my leg was suspicious enough that it should be removed. The resulting 2 weeks in a splint introduced me to the joys of a sedentary lifestyle. If I was bigger than the other kids before, as I continued to sit on my butt, continued to increase that difference. I found I wasn't the fastest runner in T-ball and my interest began to dwindle. Karate got hard too, so no more of that. By the time I was old enough to play football, my interest in sports had all but died. (I still have less interest than any other male on the planet I’m convinced) 

I'm not sure I was the fattest kid in school, but I was taller than I should have been too, so I was certainly the biggest. The difference between me and the other kids got greater and greater as the years went on. Not that having other interests didn't have its own benefits. I absolutely loved to read and remember going to the public library and leaving with so many books I could hardly carry them all. School was never really hard, I hated doing homework and almost never did any, but always seemed to ace the tests and so did rather well. By the time I graduated High school, I must have weighed at least 350lbs and certainly wasn't as happy as I could have been. 

As I began college I began to work out more than I ever had. Between trying to kill myself at the gym and a series of some of the most unhealthy crash diets you could think of I managed to lose over 120 lbs. I thought I had finally beaten my demons. 

Somewhere in the middle of that process I met the perfect woman and somehow convinced her to marry me. Married life brings its own set of challenges and between full time work and full time school, the frequency of my gym sessions dwindled. I had been able to manage pretty well at first, until out of the blue; I was struck with Bells Palsy. 

One morning I woke up with my lip slightly numb and by the end of the day had lost all ability to move my facial muscles on the right side. I had to rub lacrilube on my eye and tape it shut at night to keep it from drying out. Drinking from anything was a laughable ordeal that took forever. Although surgical decompression was considered, an aggressive dose of steroids and meds was decided upon as treatment. 

Thankfully the treatment worked and I regained about 95% of function. Even if you knew me before, it’s hard for most to tell anything different. The problem was the meds made me so dizzy that I pretty much sat on the couch all day as walking made me sick and driving was impossible. The steroids made me ravenous and my condition made me nervous... both made me eat. And Eat. Much of the weight I had been killing myself to lose over years of work came back on in a matter of months. 

So needless to say, I am not currently satisfied with my level of fitness. This is where we come in. Over the next several months I plan to report on how my diet and exercise patterns are re-invented. I’m going to do both right, the crash diets are no longer an option and thankfully I now know my way around a gym. I have a long long way to go, but the first part of my journey is a familiar one having started this process hundreds of times over the years from middle school on. What will make this cluttered spattering of thoughtless banter worthwhile is what I learn to do differently.